Bennett Gold LLP Earns Mention In Toronto Life Magazine, April 2005.

Putting Creativity to Work (A Book Review)

Regardless of the type of business you own, operate or manage you address certain harsh realities every day. Among these are the following:

1. Rapidly changing customer expectations that put pressure on your product development, marketing, sales and customer service areas;

2. The need to invest in technologies that become obsolete before you can achieve adequate return on investment;

3. A complex, diverse and often fickle workforce that makes it difficult to recruit and/or maintain the necessary competencies and skilled professionals; and

4. Industry legislation that appears to favour new competitors residing far beyond local geographic borders.

The message is clear: all is in flux. The challenge to survive and grow your business means achieving a balance between the innovation you need to anticipate and respond to these changes and establishing predictable structures/processes to realize cost efficiencies that come with repetition.

In this article we turn our attention to achieving the tenuous balance between innovation and predictability through a key component of leadership: creativity.

All new-economy business ventures must deal with creative issues. They must differentiate themselves from their "dirt-world" counterparts. Much more difficult is the enhancement of an existing brick and mortar business with the addition of an online component.

As you can probably imagine, the amount of information available on creativity is massive. Furthermore, the varying sources and methodologies to spark and/or harness creativity are likewise considerable. So, below we help you get through the maze by:

- providing a quick review of books and videos on applying creativity; and

- listing web links to organizations dedicated to the rigorous study of creativity.

Quick Reviews

In Creativity vs. Control, Stanford's James Adams addresses the issues of managing the tradeoffs between innovation and corporate stability. This 50-minute video includes exercises that help break obstacles to creativity, as well as provides 10 steps to increasing personal creativity. (Toronto: Infinite Media).

In Serious Creativity, Edward De Bono, long recognized as the trailblazer of creative thinking methods and approaches, summarizes his work over the last 30 years. This book captures the high points from almost all of his titles including: The Mechanisms of Mind, Lateral Thinking, Six Action Shoes, Six Action Hats and I am Right, You are Wrong. (New York: Harper Collins).

The video entitled, How to Be Creative on the Job, offers techniques to spur the creative processes. Included are: eight steps to make "re-creative thinking" work; exercises that allow the creative aspects of the brain to be activated; and techniques and processes to promote creative thinking. (Alexandria, V.A.: Communication Briefings).

Phyl Smith & Lynn Kearny's Creating Workplaces Where People Can Think is one text of the exceptionally applicable management series "From Training to Performance in the 21st Century". Like most books in this series, the emphasis is on real-world business application. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass).

For the past 20 years Arthur VanGundy has been studying creativity and producing guides for trainers and management. Brain Boosters for Business Advantage contains 101 involving games and activities for sparking creativity and problem solving in individuals and groups. (Toronto: Pfeiffer & Co.)

Online Creativity Resources

- American Creativity Association
- Center for Creative Learning
- Center for Studies in Creativity
- Creativity Web Links

If you are like most businesses, you already have within your existing structures the seeds for enough creativity to see your bottom line grow substantially. The challenge, however, becomes how to optimize, encourage, instill and enable such creativity from your staff, colleagues and alliances. As the sources above demonstrate, this requires the same concerted effort and dedication as establishing a successful business.

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